The spiral of transformation: returning with the treasure
Photo by Bjorn Pierre on Unsplash
Like a story, transformation is usually perceived as a journey with a beginning, a middle and an end.
In April of this year, looking to develop further as a coach and entrepreneur, I committed to one such journey by enrolling on the coachingMBA with Toku McCree. Toku’s calling is ‘to powerfully serve those who are walking the path of transformation.’ His coachingMBA mastermind group program supports coaches who want to grow their business and are passionate about initiating change in their clients and in the world.
I had no idea just how transformational my seven-month journey would be.
We experience journeys and stories in a linear way. The ‘Hero’s Journey’ (made most famous, perhaps, by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces) has become a defining structure for our time. It’s a framework we can apply to stories originating as far back as Homer’s The Odyssey through to contemporary novels, scripts and Hollywood movies. In this framework, the main character, the hero (admittedly usually male) is issued a challenge, sets off to prove, retrieve or acquire something, encounters several obstacles and returns with the holy grail, the treasure—a reward for persisting with the difficulties of the journey.
I find the Hero’s Journey model somewhat problematic (not least because of its linearity and masculinist bias). Nevertheless, it can be one lens through which to explore a process of change. Looking at my coachingMBA journey in material terms, I certainly returned with treasure: these included the numerous resources Toku shared with us (his suggested systems, structures and tools for running a business) AND an increase in my bank balance. Over the seven months, I created eight new clients and found that I’d covered the cost of the program (in fact, had the British pound not fallen against the American dollar over its duration, I’d have made a profit).
Speadsheets don’t lie. Investing in the cMBA was a sound business decision. Like the Hero’s Journey, it had a beginning, a middle and an end with a satisfying pay-off: the material rewards for my efffort.
Internal journeys, though, are just as important as external ones; we need to take them into account alongside any stats and metrics. In fact, if we’re to believe the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘the only journey is the one within.’ Added to that, transformation is, by nature, complex. It resists linearity. In the process of change, we might experience insights and commit to new actions; yet those commitments can also break down. We spiral through change, circling around and back, finding ourselves sometimes falling back into old patterns, limited once again by our narrow perception of the context in which we find ourselves.
Photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash
If I spiral back to the start of my coachingMBA journey, I can detect a cyclical process underpinning my transformation. When considering the decision of whether to enrol, I experienced huge fears around money: would it be worth it? Could I risk the investment? What about the bills I had to pay now that I’d left my secure, full-time academic post? Picture me, on the first enquiry call with Toku asking how can you help me transform my fear about money? His reply? By encouraging you to change the context.
It took months of (pretty much daily) feelings of fear and anxiety —about how to create clients; about my fluctuating income—before I hit the context-shifting transformational gold of the journey. I hit breakdown after breakdown, encountering my old habits and stories about money.
And here’s the point: I realised the treasure was itself the process—that having to lean in, repeatedly, to new ways of seeing myself and my work. It came from healing my judgements and narratives around money, acquired through years of social and cultural conditioning.
I learned this through doing, through practice—through being accountable to the group on a weekly basis, through tracking the both inner insights and shifts and outward progress, by staying in the powerful container that Toku created. That container at times felt enormously high-pressure, like a kind of crucible.
The reward, though, was alchemist’s gold.
I learned we can choose how we look at money. There is an elasticity to it. What might in one context feel too much (like a terrifying investment) in another seems like hardly anything at all when we measure the value of the experience. I learned that we can engage with money from a creative place, AS a creative entity itself: expansive rather than narrow, and full of emergent possibility.
I’m certain that, as an entrepreneur, there will be times when my fear of money kicks in again (in fact, one of my learnings is that the fear won’t go away; it’s simply a question of acceptance, of living with it and alongside it). Having completed the programme, the value of the treasure is the experience of being in an ongoing pattern of journey and return. I spiral around and fall back; I go back to the program’s learnings, and Toku’s nudges and prompts, to shore myself up. I’ve learned to notice when I’m returning to a place that feels contracted, more diminished.
Falling back and moving forward, inching upwards on the spiral of transformation; having deeper insights and seeing contexts with fresh eyes.
I’ve returned, over and over, to that key question: how will you help me transform?
Mostly, I’ve seen that it’s always possible to shift my context—not just around money, but around anything. In this sense, completing the cMBA was (like coaching itself, of course) like putting on a new pair of spectacles in which everything is seen differently and life ever-after will never be the same.
